Calamity Joe faces a resentful media
No more are they asking which flavor ice cream he prefers, as they did there at the beginning.
“Mr. President…Mr. President…what do you like best, chocolate or vanilla?”
That’s as far as it got for investigative reporting from America’s docile media. Joe had them at hello.
Now is it goodbye?
Before our eyes we are watching Joe and his presidency unraveling domino by domino as more questions are being asked about his neglect toward classified files …a serious breach.
So serious that it could bring down his presidency…especially so with the Republican House on the hunt.
There is blood in the water…all the way from China.
The switch, to aggressive reporting, happened in a blink, and it came crashing about a week ago when CBS Evening News broke the story about mishandled classified documents.
What were they doing in Joe’s former office…when they should have been turned over to the National Archives?
Joe’s alleged malfeasance is one part of the story. The other part is the media and how they turned to activists after so many years on snooze control.
They turned on him, the thinking goes, because they find him unfit to run again, and are thus preparing America for a fresher face, someone like Pete Buttigieg.
Pete, today’s Transportation Secretary, is equally incompetent, and he is gay, therefore perfectly suited for the highest office, thanks to the Democrats.
Identity politics uber alles.
Better, they reason, a young fool than an old fool…and whatever Joe did to ruin the country, Pete, or perhaps Kamala, can finish the job.
Either way, the media woke up and for the first time found imperfections in good old Joe…actually, the first time they found faults in any Democrat.
The answers coming from Joe’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, were found wanting and misleading, in what used to be called a “credibility gap.”
After CBS came NBC and even ABC, and together they found and exposed Joe as the hoarder of classified documents, stashes of them here, there, and everywhere.
Not so fast, though.
Originally, they tried to play it down. No big deal, they said. Why…only a few pages were found, compared to Trump’s larger haul of forbidden material at Mar a Lago.
Biden good. Trump bad.
Oops. Now they have found 20 such secret materials on Joe’s properties.
To divert attention, The New York Times began running stories meant to prove that the Biden family is not crooked.
Joe, the paper alleged, knew nothing about Hunter’s shady business deals, and for sure Joe never shared, nor got rich, from the proceedings. Never. Never. Never.
Not a chance that China has got its paws all over father and son.
The rest of them, however, continued to assail Joe…an amazing turn of events and a lesson to what happens when you poke the sleeping giant, the media.
You don’t want the media turning on you.
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency came to an end after Walter Cronkite, note, CBS, visited Vietnam and came back to say the war was “wasteful.”
Johnson declined to run for a second term.
Richard Nixon was undone by Watergate. He resigned after being exposed by Woodward and Bernstein and The Washington Post.
Both presidents were caught being dishonest.
Joe can’t give a straight answer…not even on ice cream.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Email Jack here.
